Debating Which Perks Best Motivate Employees. Free Lunch?

At the most recent She Owns It business group meeting, the owners talked about retaining and motivating employees. Katie Finnegan said she realized the importance of this task soon after her company, Hukkster, made its first hires. To get ideas, she and Hukkster’s co-owner, Erica Bell, spent an afternoon at the San Francisco office of Twitter, where one of Ms. Finnegan’s friends works.

“I can’t imagine what their operating budget is for their employees,” Ms. Finnegan said. Still, she found it interesting to see which perks seemed to offer the greatest return on the company’s investment. For example, she said, Twitter’s offices have fairly extravagant game rooms on every floor. “Those were totally dead empty,” she said, suggesting that just one would do the job.

The free food was another story. Ms. Finnegan’s friend told her that Twitter offers employees three meals a day and that the benefit is a great productivity boost. “He’s like, “If I’m going to get dinner, I’ll stay an extra hour, hour-and-a-half to work, eat dinner, and then I’ll go out to meet my friends for a drink,’ ” she said. The incremental cost of the meal, she said, is well worth it for Twitter.

But Hukkster wanted to know how Twitter kept employees happy in its leaner early days. Ms. Finnegan said she learned that being transparent with employees was key. While Hukkster had always shared company information with its staff, Ms. Finnegan said they began to offer employees updates on the business more actively after the Twitter visit.

“That’s huge,” said Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour, also a start-up.

“For example, today we sent our investor update to the whole team,” Ms. Finnegan said. While none of the information it provided was news to the employees, she said, seeing it consolidated in the same way it is presented to investors was motivational.

Sending employees updates this way, Ms. Lord said, conveys that they are as important as the investors.

Hukkster has found ways to offer Twitter-style benefits on a smaller scale. For example, the company provides team lunches every Friday. Ms. Finnegan said Hukkster discovered the power of a free lunch during its summer internship program, which featured lunchtime speakers — and food.

“We noticed that the employees would come in every week and be like, ‘Is there extra?’” she said, adding that she remembers thinking, “You guys are that excited about sandwiches?” But really, she said, the enthusiasm seemed to stem more from the fact that the company took the trouble to devise a creative, fun menu. “We realized that that made a big difference,” she said.

The average age of a Hukkster employee is about 26, Ms. Finnegan said. She asked Susan Parker, a co-owner of Bari Jay, whether a free lunch would motivate her employees, who are, in many cases, considerably older.

“It’s so interesting that you say that,” Ms. Parker said. She noted that some of her employees have been with the company for more than 20 years, and they dislike one another intensely: “I’ve said, Let’s go for dinner, the three of us, let’s go and sit down. They were like, ‘We really have no interest.’ ”

And yet, things have worked out. “They’ve actually gotten to the point where they work together great, and they get along,” Ms. Parker said. Older workers bring a very different mentality, she said, adding that they can be stubborn and set in their ways.

Employee work attitudes also tend to evolve over time, Ms. Blumin pointed out. “When you’re in your 50s working, you’re like, ‘I’m going to be home and I’m going to be cooking dinner.’ ” She said that this is especially true for people who see their work as a job, not a career.

Ms. Parker agreed. She said a free dinner sounds great until you become a mom or dad. After that, she said, “It’s like, ‘Well I could go home, and I could eat with my kids.’ ”

Ms. Blumin said her employees have taken the initiative to get together on their own outside work. Specifically, they take classes on the history of New York’s architecture at the 92nd Street Y. The company pays for it and gives them time off to attend, but it was the employees who found the class.

“I’d love to take credit for this, but this was all them,” Ms. Blumin said. The classes reinforce Skylight’s brand message as a company that provides clients with architecturally and historically significant event spaces. When Skylight’s employees can speak with clients on a more intellectual, academic level, it enriches the client’s experience, she said.

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